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Wayback machine for Debian repositories

The Debian project has announced the availability of a new archive snapshot service at snapshot.debian.org. With the new service, users can access older packages based on dates and version numbers.

The project administrators hope that the new service will be helpful to both users and developers, pointing out that it will provide "a valuable resource for tracking down when regressions were introduced, or for providing a specific environment that a particular application may require to run." The service also allows administrators to test upgrade paths in staging environments before rolling them out into a production environment.

In addition to archives such as debian-volatile, debian-ports and backports.org, the archive currently contains nearly all of the main and security archive packages since March of 2005 – a total of approximately 6.5 terabytes of data. The snapshot archive can be accessed like any other normal apt repository.